After around 40 posts here, I decided to take a look at the whole effort and ask some questions. For example
- Should (scientific) blogs be used to report new science, or merely opinion on existing science (see this blog also)?
- If the former, should they be abstracted in the manner of regular articles (e.g. by CAS etc).
- Unlike e.g. a journal, a blog is often (and certainly in this case) the effort of an individual. Journals on the other hand can last for centuries (see for example this link to the ToC of the world’s oldest scientific journal that has been in continuous publication for 355 years!). So how long should/can a blog last?
- The last question leads on to whether blogs should be archived or curated in a larger sense?
The last question leads directly to projects such as ArchivePress which has just started up a few months ago. I will quote two of their objectives
- Methodology and guidance for the effective capture and management of blog posts.
- Scripts/plugins to enable WordPress to be used as a blog aggregator and archiving engine.
Of course, this will have to be a fairly generic solution, and certainly one aspect of my blog presents another challenge, namely how to preserve the molecules mentioned here (many of the posts include 3D coordinates lurking under the images). But one step at a time!
I will post on another solution to the preservation issues, which should enter the public domain in a month or so. Meanwhile, let’s see what the ArchivePress project can offer!
Tags: Chemical IT, generic solution
I had not heard of ArchivePress -sounds like an interesting group to contact about our ONSarchive project
http://onsarchive.wikispaces.com
It reminds me of WebCite, which I have used occasionally for blog posts or even GoogleSpreadsheets – (for example to take a snapshot of the database used for each edition of our solubility book)
Dear Henry
I finally found and published the post you donated to the ArchivePress blog – http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/blog/ – thank you very much it is greatly appreciated, and I am encouraged that your thoughts are not unaligned with other serious thinkers on the matter that we cite ad nauseam!
There will shortly be a post about the Alpha version of the AP plugins – but if you are feeling brave, and don’t mind the absence of any documentation, you are welcome to grab a copy at http://code.google.com/p/archivepress/downloads/list
(Be warned: it can populate a WordPress instance quite quickly)
Broadly, my view is that, for all their deceptive simplicity, blogs represent a new dynamic in CMC, with some familiar aspects and some unfamiliar – and plenty of scope for fear and misunderstanding on the one hand, and highly creative and disruptive applications on the other .
‘When is a journal not a journal? When it’s a blog!’ (This might work in reverse too!)
And, Jean-Claude – WebCite is indeed a great idea. Gunther Eysenbach at U. Toronto has told me that they struggle to make ends meet with it, notwithstanding its apparent adoption by BMC. If anyone wants to help or support him, I’m sure he’d be most grateful. One idea might be for each Institutional library to provide its own WebCite tool for staff and students and researchers. I discussed much of this stuff in a little article for Ariadne recently: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/davis/
[…] since currently at least, the longevity of a journal is considered longer than that of a blog (see this post here for more ruminations on that theme). There are other good reasons for then choosing a journal […]